Government Notifies Banks On Uneven PoS Numbers

The government now hopes to achieve $40 billion in digital payments in the country this fiscal year, raising the target for last year by more than 33 per cent.

The government has written to the bank to emphasize the bleak performance of deploying point-of-sale (PoS) terminals to facilitate cash-free transactions, reaching only 44 per cent of last year’s target by the end of January.

Although a key official of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said in a letter to bank executives that although 41 per cent of the target was achieved in the Northeast, it reached 16 per cent in rural areas.

For digital transactions, the government includes IMPS (Immediate Payment Service), NEFT (National Electronic Fund Transfer), UPI (Unified Payments Interface), micro ATMs through AePS (Aadhaar-enabled Payments), auto debit transactions through NACH (National Automated Clearing House) and toll payments through NETC (National Electronic Toll Collection). It also calculates transactions reported by mobile wallets such as Paytm, MobiKwik and FreeCharge.

Betting high on digital payments
The government now hopes to achieve $40 billion in digital payments in the country this fiscal year, raising the target for last year by more than 33 per cent. To achieve this goal, banks have been authorized to deploy 8.5 million PoS terminals in rural and northeastern states. 

According to the English Daily, MeitY has set a total target of 401.9 billion rupees for digital payment transactions for FY20. Among them, the target of digital payment transactions of Rs 341.1 billion is allocated to the banks, the official said in a note on March 29.

According to the temporary data of the Digidhan website operated by the Ministry, as of the end of March 2019, the total number of digital transactions reached 26 billion, with a target of 30 billion. This is the third consecutive year that the government has set a digital payment target. In 2017, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced the first batch of $25 billion. None of the goals has been met.